Grafana
New Relic
| Feature | Grafana | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free / from $29/mo | Free / from $0.3/mo |
| Free Plan | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 | 4.3 / 5 |
| Best For | devops-teams, sre-teams, data-engineers, iot-monitoring | development-teams, sre-teams, startups, devops-engineers |
| Founded | 2014 | 2008 |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✗ |
| Data Sources | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alerting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Annotations | ✓ | ✗ |
| Plugins | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loki Logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tempo Traces | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mimir Metrics | ✓ | ✗ |
| Apm | ✗ | ✓ |
| Infrastructure Monitoring | ✗ | ✓ |
| Log Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Browser Monitoring | ✗ | ✓ |
| Synthetics | ✗ | ✓ |
| Ai Assistant | ✗ | ✓ |
| Distributed Tracing | ✗ | ✓ |
| Error Tracking | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ Grafana Pros
- Connects to virtually any data source
- Beautiful and highly customizable dashboards
- Open-source with massive community
- Grafana Cloud includes Loki, Tempo, and Mimir
- Alerting across all data sources
✗ Grafana Cons
- Self-hosting requires DevOps expertise
- Dashboard creation has a learning curve
- Plugin quality varies
✓ New Relic Pros
- Generous free tier with 100GB/month data ingest
- Full-stack observability in one platform
- Usage-based pricing is cost-effective for many teams
- Strong AI assistant (New Relic AI) for troubleshooting
✗ New Relic Cons
- Per-user pricing for full platform access
- Data retention limits on free tier
- Can be complex to set up comprehensively
The Verdict
Grafana is built for devops teams and sre teams, with a focus on dashboards and data-sources. New Relic targets development teams and sre teams and leads with apm and infrastructure-monitoring.
On pricing, New Relic is the clear winner for budget-conscious users — starting at $0.3/mo compared to $29/mo for Grafana. That $28.7/mo difference adds up quickly for growing teams.
Both offer free plans, so you can test each with your real workflow before committing to a subscription.
Both tools are a solid fit for sre teams — in those cases, the decision often comes down to workflow style and how your team prefers to organize work.
Bottom line: Grafana has a slight overall edge — but if generous free tier with 100gb/month data ingest matters most to you, New Relic may still be the right call.